This invention relates to lottery tickets.
The Pennsylvania State lottery game xe2x80x9cSuper 6 Lottoxe2x80x9d, is exemplary of many. If one were to purchase a $5 ticket, one would receive a ticket with 15 groups of numbers, each group containing six numbers, for a total of 90 numbers, the numbers within each group being selected from 1 through 69. Of course, if all six of the numbers in one group later match the winning 6 numbers, the ticket purchaser is a winner. The ticket purchaser is also a winner if 3, 4 or 5 of the numbers within a group match any of the winning numbers. Comparing the numbers in the ticket to the winning numbers can become tedious, especially if, for example, a group of individuals working together decide to pool their ticket purchases. Ten $5 tickets would have 900 numbers to check. The designated ticket checker could waste upwards of an hour determining if a ticket is a winner. State lotteries fund many worthwhile causes, but the mathematical permutations and combinations required to check if a ticket is a winner is unpleasantly work-like to many individuals and inhibits ticket sales.
The invention includes a method for checking lottery tickets comprising the steps of digitizing at least one lottery ticket comprising lottery numbers to form an image, performing optical character recognition (OCR) on the image to obtain the lottery numbers, comparing the lottery ticket lottery numbers to at least one winning lottery number and reporting the winning status of the at least one lottery ticket.
In a preferred embodiment, the invention allows a purchaser of lottery tickets to scan multiple lottery tickets at once, send the resulting image to a web site, where the web site will indicate to the purchaser whether any of the tickets are winners and also highlight on the image for the purchaser the location of a winning ticket in the image and also highlight where on the ticket the winning number is.